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Has anyone else tried donating boats to charity?

If anyone is looking to get rid of a boat i would highly suggest thinking about donating it to Charity Boats. When you donate your boat you receive a fair market tax deduction. You will also be supporting many worthy causes such as children and family services, youth development, orphanages and homeless families and individuals. Charity Boats is a nationwide charity so where ever you are they will come to you and pick up your donation at no cost to you. So i urge anyone struggling to sell or repair a boat to at least check out their website charityboats.org , you can do yourself a favor and also benefit many individuals in need.

I have never donated a boat but I did donate a trailer (for carrying a car) and a Car. I towed the trailer to their drop off point, but they came and towed the car away. Both were a good deal. The trailer actually sold at auction for more than I paid or it, so I got a full value tax deduction. The car not so much but still a nice deduction.

Donating the boat to charity is a fine thing, but the tax deduction is tricky. It is my understanding that your deduction is the actual price paid when sold by the charity. If the charity keeps it for its own purposes, then you get the surveyed value.

I got an email from a group in Atlanta that wanted me to donate my houseboat. They wanted to use it to house (mainly) homeless veterans, many of them disabled. I suggested that their mission might not be well thought out; that placing a person or family that my have physical challenges in an unfamiliar living environment that contained higher than normal risks was perhaps not such a good idea.

I tried this once with a worn out houseboat. Granted it needed some work but then again if it was in great shape I would have sold it. The biggest problem I had is they wanted to leave it in the slip until they had a buyer. Because it was a 35' x 12' boat hauling was the key. I ended up giving the boat away, the guy that got it was going to get it reworked but he lived on the lake and pulled it down the lake to the guy who was going to rebuild it. Basically no transportation cost other than a little gas.